Tuesday, 2 February 2010

Darwin’s (or Herbert Spencer’s) term ‘survival of the fittest' alludes to a philosophy that transcends generations. This isn’t any essay on Darwinian Theory but something more boring. One has to sweat it out in every sphere of life. Like for example, I was joyfully concentrating on this pretty chick on a bus, listen to a groovy song to fit my rather promiscuous mood, when this pretty pretty boy caught her attention. And lo behold she was hooked onto him. Gender bias I say. Even the girls are hooked onto the boys. In Orkut lingo, ‘no donuts’ for women empowerment.

And so the Fittest wins by rummaging through the survival strategies. As I hop on to the bus after college to spare me the extra pennies that are downright pinched through my pocket if I take an auto rickshaw, I have to do this impromptu nagin dance jig to slither into the maize of sweaty fellow passengers. I stand on the door of the bus, on the threshold of life and death, praying to the God whom I pray to when I am in an extremely strategic position, muttering bribes so that the not-so-benign Almighty spare me the horror of being made into a newspaper headline “Thin girl squeezed to death. Mamata Banerjee blames the CPM, crying conspiracy” or something like that. As I enter the bus finally, Rajnikanth attitude style, I am made to do obscure yogic postures that even Vatsayana and Co. couldn’t dream of, let alone write. Thanks to my extreme lack of volume I eventually squeeze out a seat between two people. Gosh, the things one has to do to do a simple thing as sitting.

And then in the same bus, one might chance upon two fellow women, keenly interested in their (and others’) hyper-motherhood, and their conversations that have a strong and sinister undertone of baby competition. So if Momma in Red Sari says her litter could walk at the age of 1 year, the Momma in Blue attempts to shut her up by citing examples of her little kid’s running, Usain Bolt style. I distinctly remember one such victim of Hyper-Parenting-Syndrome who insisted that her class three kid could spell P for pneumonia when other kids could only blurt A for apple. And so the kids of these are made to run in the race and sweat it like a man, even though the blighted creatures don’t even know how to adjust their own nappies. And since then they fight it out. Man to man and woman to woman. (Man to woman: they don’t usually fight…ahem). They fight it out on the field of education, love life and marriage, divorces and old age, and let’s face it. Even death.

The need for me to hop out of the bus takes a lot of meditation and planning. I see the front door and the back door. Wherever the coast is clear, I try to manoeuvre myself to that side. I have this feeling of struggling against the whole world as I find myself trying to wriggle out of the people hanging from the bus handles. I do my famous obscure yogic postures. Do the slithering nagin dance. And finally I hop out of it. And peace. This reminds me. in the crematoriums, there is usually a big line for the resting-in-peace fellows. The one who could ‘come first’ in the ‘dying examination’ goes in first. Theologically speaking, probably he gets a faster Nirvana. And so the rat race continues. In life as in death.